Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch Dies at 88

Former New York City mayor Ed Koch, a man whose boundless energy would be remarkable and inspiring in a person a tenth of his age, died today of congestive heart failure.

The 88-year-old presided over the City of New York from 1978 to 1989 and after his tenure ended lived a “whirlwind life as a television judge, radio talk-show host, author, law partner, newspaper columnist, movie reviewer, professor, commercial pitchman and political gadfly,” The New York Times reports in its beautifully written eight-page obituary. There are so many evocative and surprising descriptions of Koch from that piece—he “could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother”; “squinty-eyed, baldish, with a nimbus of gray and a U-shape smile more satanic than cherubic, Mr. Koch told a story like a raconteur in a deli, kvetching and ah-hahing with the timing of a Catskill comic”—that we fully recommend everyone, even non–New Yorkers, read the whole thing.

The first of Koch’s mayoral terms saw the end of septic, scratchiti’ed 1970s. During the second, he enjoyed an unprecedented wave of popular support—“he became the first mayor in the city’s history to get both the Democratic and the Republican nominations,” the Times notes. His less successful third term was marred by a corruption scandal, including widespread bribery and graft within the city’s transportation and building departments. Throughout his mayoralty, which coincided with the apex of the AIDS crisis, Koch had a contentious relationship with the gay and black communities.

All three terms are the subject of a new documentary, Koch,which premieres today in New York. Even now, “the timing of a Catskill comic.”